Feed your need for speed by installing SSDs in RAID 0

RAID 0 works far better with SSDs than it does with hard drives, because mechanical drives aren’t fast enough to take full advantage of the increased bandwidth.

This tip is primarily for desktop PC owners.

The performance of both the Intel 730 Series and the Plextor M6e drives improved immensely when paired up in a striped array—between 46- and 88 percent on the plus side. We performed a write test by copying a single large file (10GB) to the drive under evaluation, and a read test by copying that same file from the drive. We repeat this sequence with a 10GB collection of small files and folders.

The 730 Series SSD wrote the single large file at 470.4MBps and read that file at 376.2MBps. It wrote our 10GB collection of small files and folders at 479.0MBps, and it read them at 351.3MBps.

When we paired two of these drives in RAID 0, large-file write and read speeds skyrocketed to 800.1MBps and 707.3MBps respectively, while the collection-of-small-files write and read speeds exploded to 811.3MBps and 582.3MBps respectively. That’s an overall average of 725.3MBps reading and writing. Intel tells us running four 730 Series drives in RAID 0 can achieve average speeds of 1.2GBps.

The Plextor M6e’s PCIe interface delivers higher performance than the older SATA 6Gbps can muster.
Be sure to have a routine backup plan in place. If any drive in a RAID 0 configuration fails, you could lose all your data.